jQuery 3.6.0

http://blog.jquery.com/2021/03/02/jquery-3-6-0-released/

by mkurz • 5 years ago

325 280 5 years ago

blog.jquery.com

elwell• 5 years ago

Those API docs are so nostalgic.

singhrac• 5 years ago

I love the fact that they haven't changed styles in a decade. It really does bring me back to high school.

newsbinator• 5 years ago

We still have our eyes on a jQuery 4.0 release, but until then we will continue to support the 3.x branch and address important issues.

pier252• 5 years ago

This caught my eye too. What could they be cooking?

TimTheTinker2• 5 years ago

My guess is a slimmed-down API with most or all support for older browsers removed, perhaps something similar to Zepto.

There is still something to be said for the usability of jQuery's API for direct DOM manipulation, as opposed to the more verbose API offered by the DOM itself.

henryfjordan• 5 years ago

There seems to be milestones for 4.0 setup on Github: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/milestone/7

distrill• 5 years ago

I know jquery is still in use a lot all over the web, but are people still starting new projects with it?

garymoon• 5 years ago

I think it is still widely adopted in CMSs like Drupal and Wordpress and they have a big market share. Jquery will not die soon even if it is not the first choice for starting a new project. It's been years since the last time I used it.

noisem4ker• 5 years ago

Yes. It's fine for progressive enhancement of server-side-rendered webpages.

greenie_beans• 5 years ago

I've had to learn it at a new job after starting my career making UIs with React. It's not so bad.

ativzzz• 5 years ago

Absolutely. Starting most new projects with something like React/Vue is complete overkill and jquery makes adding small incremental JS functionality to your app a breeze.

solraph2• 5 years ago

I can't speak for React, but I found adding VueJS was perfect for adding JS functionality incrementally to a section of a site. See my other comment on this thread on using it to create a dynamic contact form to an otherwise static site.

cphoover7• 5 years ago

Do people still use jQuery?

I thought the biggest advantage of this library back in the day was css selector access of DOM nodes (back when we only had getElementById, getElementsByClassName, and getElementsByTagName). This has been rolled into the Javascript document api via document.querySelector, and document.querySelectorAll.

Also there are browser compatibility issues that jQuery solved but a lot of these are solved with smaller footprint libraries like lodash.

Also for me, along with I'm sure many others, keeping state within the DOM has fallen out of favor of more comprehensible state management inside of JS (like React Hooks, Redux...etc.)

What is the current use-case for jQuery? I'm curious from hearing it's current users answer this.

k__• 5 years ago

Legacy systems, probably.

I read, Ember.js would depend on it.

m00dy• 5 years ago

I use it for my landing page in countingcarbons.co

duxup• 5 years ago

Every day I do.

Granted I don't so much as use it as I fix it / change it.

Anything new is just vanilla as far as the legacy systems go. But those legacy systems pay the bills...

muglug2• 5 years ago

I think a lot! For example, the new https://www.whitehouse.gov uses jQuery.

When you just want to add a small bit of interaction to a mostly-static site, jQuery can help.

There's a current trend to complicate things with a JAM stack that really don't need to be complicated.

I've seen people propose something like

    [NodeJS/Ruby/PHP backend] 
      -> GraphQL API 
      -> React Frontend 
      -> static html

Where really they could have just gone with

    [NodeJS/Ruby/PHP backend] 
      -> static html

kyriakos• 5 years ago

To be fair the first case is only static for the initial load then becomes a single page application

wishinghand4• 5 years ago

When you just want to add a small bit of interaction to a mostly-static site

Then I'd reach for Alpine. Very lightweight, and I can use the fetch API instead of $.ajax.

ognarb• 5 years ago

I do think in some cases SPA make sense, but in many other cases just using a bit of jQuery/vanilla js to add a bit of interaction is enough. Server side rendering is way easier to do and is often faster to load for the client.

snemvalts• 5 years ago

There's no need to complicate static sites with jQuery. All it does can be achieved with vanilla.

moocowtruck• 5 years ago

whitehouse.gov uses jquery because its wordpress

solraph2• 5 years ago

When you just want to add a small bit of interaction to a mostly-static site, jQuery can help.

For very small amounts, perhaps, but honestly, even then I think it has limitations. As an anecdote, about six months ago, I needed to add a couple of dynamic forms to a static site. The forms were a simple contact us, and a mailing list sign up form, and only needed to handle the states of Open->Submitting->Thanks|Failed->Open, while preventing double submissions, etc.

I wrote the first one in jQuery (site was already using it due to the theming), and making sure handled all the various edge cases, and fixing one bug didn't cause another was far harder and time consuming than it should be.

Out of frustration, I wrote the other form in VueJS, and hacked the whole form in about an hour or two. My take away was that anything involving state in jQuery can get overly complicated very quickly.

krab• 5 years ago

For me personally, it's partly familiarity and also still compatibility. I know that if I use jQuery, then (for the parts it covers) I don't have to search caniuse.com.

But then, I'm not a front-end web developer, so I optimize for different type of projects.

HaloZero• 5 years ago

I use it primarily because it provides an easy interface for ancestor, descendant utilities. But I'm also not doing this in a FT setting, just for side projects.

llarsson• 5 years ago

Every single WordPress blog ships it by default.

I would not start a greenfield project based on it today, sure, but it is used by a truly staggering amount of sites today, so having it get updates in the form of security fixes and some additional functionality benefits a large part of the web.

bcrosby952• 5 years ago

This has been rolled into the Javascript document api via document.querySelector, and document.querySelectorAll.

Have you actually compared the two methods in a real website? It's like saying why use Ruby when you can use Java. The Javascript document API is super verbose. No thanks.

frabert• 5 years ago

How so? Who stops you from doing something like `const $ = document.querySelector`?

cphoover7• 5 years ago

You don't have to use all of it though, right? You can choose to only only use the applicable parts: eg:

``` $('.container-element') .addClass('active');

// vs

document.querySelectorAll('.my-class-selector') .classList.add('active') ```

I use the native APIs all the time, they are not that complicated or overly verbose. Easily memorized with practice IMHO. Also they are all extremely well documented on MDN.

Kaze4043• 5 years ago

Conversely, looking at how you do it through jQuery after seeing how it is in Javascript gives me the same reaction.

The fact that jQuery is usually assigned to the dollar sign definitely doesn't help, especially for beginners. The amount of questions I've answered that stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of how Javascript works, all because they learned jQuery instead of Javascript, is pretty significant.

bilekas• 5 years ago

The Javascript document API is super verbose.

Can't say I've ever heard that as an issue before..

Also I think the main point was there are so many better frameworks that manage the DOM better than jQuery as the need has evolved. I'll always have fond memories of jQuery but I don't see it as my go-to anymore, by a long shot.

runj__• 5 years ago

I'm still a little bit sad we got fetch as part of javascript when the request module had such a great interface. I still prefer the look of it.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/request

laurent92• 5 years ago

I never understood why people say “We’ve solved your jQuery problem” by introducing getElementsByClassName() or even querySelector(). When I come back to my older app, $(“.my-class”) is still much nicer. jQuery gets out of the way, the class gets syntax-highlighted, and .focus() can’t create an NPE.

wishinghand4• 5 years ago

One could also save document.querySelector to $ as a constant.

tyingq3• 5 years ago

I know it doesn't replace jQuery, but this is fairly straightforward:

  $ = document.querySelector.bind(document)
  $$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document)

josteink• 5 years ago

jQuery gets out of the way, the class gets syntax-highlighted, and .focus() can’t create an NPE.

So if your selector is wrong, you won’t actually know, because your code will pretend to run along just fine.

I personally consider that a con, not a pro, and one of my (many) reasons not to use jQuery.

aakkaarr• 5 years ago

It is still bundled in WordPress and WP is still most popular CMS (30% sites on the web runs on it)

It is not necessary to use jQuery when you build site but tons of tutorials on the web is using it so people does.

Plus wp-admin still loads jQuery for itself so it is in use even unnoticed.

abhisuri97• 5 years ago

Yep. I still use it for side one-off projects here and there. For me, there's just something so convenient about being able to make a html page that you can drop in a quick CDN link for jquery and not have to worry about compiling, webpack, create-react-app etc. I'll still use React when something is a larger project with a ton of moving parts, but otherwise I stick with jquery.

As for why I'm not using the native DOM api's...I could, but haven't gotten around to learning that syntax since I'm very used to jquery (being specific, if I want to do things that are more complicated than selecting an element + changing its properties, the native API is more complicated). jquery is just a nice default.

cphoover7• 5 years ago

I hear you. Personally I think learning the native APIs isn't so bad once you take the plunge. They are easily memorized with practice. Imagine not needing to go for that CDN link (or depending on some 3p for your website to work correctly)

megous10• 5 years ago

It's not that more complicated. There are after()/before()/closest()/remove(), and a lot of other similar easy to use methods these days.

It's not el.parentNode.insertBefore(new, el) and el.parentNode.removeChild(el) days anymore.

spiderfarmer2• 5 years ago

Daily.

tenryuu• 5 years ago

I dropped it a long time ago for similar reasons to only using selectors. It was not worth adding the extra request and execution time for what was really now a vanilla feature.

RHSeeger• 5 years ago

It is literally the first thing I add to every personal project I build, and it's included with a lot of things I work with professionally. Jquery just makes life easier.

lostgame• 5 years ago

This. I can just prototype something so gosh darn quickly in jQuery and I'm so used to it by this point that between that and advancements in CSS it's incredibly awesome.

Why replace what's not broken?

tyingq3• 5 years ago

"What is the current use-case for jQuery? I'm curious from hearing it's current users answer this."

I still see it used for file upload/download, as the fetch api doesn't provide a reasonable way to show progress if the channel is using gzip or deflate. The ajax functionality is also still popular for a compact way to deal with different types of errors (app errors vs connectivity errors).

kemiller2002• 5 years ago

There are still a ton of legacy sites that use it. New development? Don't know, but the last 2 companies I worked for had massive systems written in JQuery.

justsomeuser• 5 years ago

I like jQuery because:

- The API is still more concise than what is built into the browser (Compare the number of lines used here: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/)

- It is still useful for older browsers that might not support something.

- The API is burned into my brain, it speaks jQuery.

- If I have any issues, Google will usually surface how to use the API faster than the (standards compliant API * can I use it?)

I do use React for UI, but sometimes you have to interact with the DOM; in those cases for larger programs I find jQuery easier to read and write.

manishsharan• 5 years ago

I use it extensively to maintaining our apps ui which has coded with old fashioned Backbone, Underscore and Jquery. our UI is working and we do not see need to re-engineer/refactor it to go to newer frameworks just for the sake of it.

brunojppb• 5 years ago

You wouldn’t believe in the amount of solid applications using jQuery out there. It’s still widely adopted, specially when you are maintaining legacy applications. While I personally don’t use it in my day job anymore (Mostly React nowadays), I still know a good number of people that use jQuery in my local community. Worth noting: Legacy doesn’t mean bad. Just software that sustained the tough test of time.

mortenjorck• 5 years ago

jQuery is like WordPress. There may be other more streamlined, purpose-built solutions out there, and they all have their uses, but sometimes ease of setup is the thing you're optimizing for, sexiness be damned.

When you have a vast, mature ecosystem and a decade and a half of community knowledge to draw upon, even the most obscure use cases tend to have a precedent somewhere. Being able to jump right to a StackOverflow answer to exactly what you're trying to do is, in my opinion, a highly underrated feature of legacy web technology.

andrei_says_2• 5 years ago

I’ve seen the code of Wordpress and would not touch the spaghetti cluster-f that it is.

I won’t even speak of the ecosystem built on the above principles.

All I can say is that a 1-click install does translate to popularity :)

mschuetz• 5 years ago

I'm trying to wean off of jQuery to reduce dependencies, but it makes me appreciate jQuery all the more. The native JS API is quite a bit more verbose and cumbersome to use, and my absolute biggest gripe with it is that it doesn't even build on modern JS features. It's not compatible with for...of, map, filter, find, etc, which seems really strange for a relatively recent vanilla JS API.

Ironically, http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ makes a pretty good case in favour of jQuery.

megous10• 5 years ago

You can easily extend NodeList.prototype with Array.prototype functions you like, and then just use them:

    ['map', 'find'].forEach(f => NodeList.prototype[f] = Array.prototype[f]);

    document.querySelectorAll('bla').map(el => whatever)

That's what prototypes are for, anyway.

bigfudge5• 5 years ago

What I don't understand is why the modern js api didn't just adopt query's conventions... they're so much nicer and more expressive most of the time.

tambourine_man6• 5 years ago

Do people still use jQuery?

Oh yes. Everyday. Still love it.

…Javascript document api via document.querySelector, and document.querySelectorAll

The jQuery API is still (and probably aways will be) far superior to the native DOM (terser, composable, more expressive, etc).

…smaller footprint libraries like lodash

jQuery is ≈30k gziped and most likely already cached from CDN.

…has fallen out of favor of more comprehensible state management inside of JS (like React Hooks, Redux...etc.)

Managing state is hard. There shouldn't be much of it in any single view. IMO, React doesn't bring much to the table in this regard while adding a lot of complexity and heft. Vue is a bit better, but still, I'd much rather use jQuery if given the choice.

If you're building something like Spotify/Slack, I can maybe see the need for virtual DOMs, etc. If you're sprinkling interactivity to your webpage, which is arguably what most of the web should be, jQuery is probably as good as it will ever get.

actuator3• 5 years ago

IMO, React doesn't bring much to the table in this regard while adding a lot of complexity and heft.

Strongly disagree with this. In any complex web application with a lot of components, specially ones where a lot of fixed components can live for a while, React is definitely a massive improvement over vanilla JS or something like Backbone which allows wild west.

Imagine state coming from sockets, rest APIs etc with updates being either pull or push. A user might do an action which changes the state in some other component, keeping track of the components gets hard if the state is distributed. Also, centrally managed state with things like Redux allows for good caching of API data which can make a SPA considerably fast.

While I love plain HTML pages which need little or no JS, a lot of applications are better as SPAs.

ivosaur• 5 years ago

jQuery is ≈30k gziped and most likely already cached from CDN.

This part isn't so true in reality anymore, due to revised browser caching systems[1]. Doesn't mean you shouldn't use jQuery, just that part of the benefits of a centralized CDN are no longer a factor and it's a lot more sensible to self-host.

1: https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-ca...

Kudos• 5 years ago

Firefox and Safari use partitioned caches, and Chrome is following with the feature behind an experiment flag for now. The argument that it's probably cached from a CDN is just about dead.

1shooner2• 5 years ago

most likely already cached from CDN.

I don't believe any major browser allows sites to share 3rd party caches anymore.

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894135

enraged_camel• 5 years ago

I used to write a lot of JQuery, and I've switched to Vue three years ago. Occasionally I have to go back and write more JQuery, and it makes my head hurt.

edit: why the dowvotes? are we not allowed to share our experiences now?

steviedotboston• 5 years ago

I agree with this 100%. Even though "vanilla JS" is more powerful now, JQuery is still much easier to work with.

pseudosavant2• 5 years ago

"The jQuery API is still (and probably aways will be) far superior to the native DOM"

The jQuery API really is so well done. I stopped using jQuery, but implemented a simple script (jSugar.js) that exposes many basic jQuery things but is really just a wrapper for native DOM operations. It only operates on individual DOM nodes. Any looping should be done using your JS loop of choice (forEach, for loop, which, etc).

The script started out really small. I've slowly added more and more as I need more functionality for some projects.

https://gist.github.com/pseudosavant/b86eedd9960ade958d49447...

cphoover7• 5 years ago

Smaller footprint in my mind doesn't refer to download size which is minimal in either case but the footprint or impact on a project. IMO It is way harder to move off of jquery once it has been fully utilized throughout the project than to swap a single function to/from lodash once a core API has a better way of handling it. Using JQuery demands you buy into the whole ecosystem whereas Lodash is modular.

Also as others have mentioned caches are individually isolated for each domain now to prevent tracking/data leaks.

thatsnotmepls• 5 years ago

If you're building something like Spotify/Slack, I can maybe see the need for virtual DOMs

Heck, even Slack was built with jQuery the first time. Only after a while they migrated to react.

gorgoiler• 5 years ago

I think it’s like Lisp, or rather the reaction to Lisp.

In a world without jQuery every site / devshop uses their own little set of conventions and polyfills (analogous to macros) to add useful abstractions.

In isolation, these are neat. En masse though it means that each site has their own meta language (conventions) which have to be memorized before you can contribute to the code base. Languages like Ruby and Lisp suffer from this too: there are so many minute variants across code based that it becomes hard to truly view them as the same language. jQuery, in the context of JavaScript, is a standardisation track for all those little language additions.

Personally, I just use the native APIs. I don’t work with enough people across enough sites to benefit from standardisation. You will probably find a big overlap between proponents of jQuery and professionals — especially contractors — who work with many other people on many different codebases.

bigfudge5• 5 years ago

Or just people who have a poor memory, or who are not very self consistent. I love things like jquery (and Django and other opinionated frameworks) because it saves me the hassle of having bike shed trivial details for myself and then remember them later. And naming things is one of the two hard problems etc...

blain• 5 years ago

Well, Wordpress and Drupal still uses jQuery, they auto load it by default and there is no reason not use at this point, unless you specifically building React or some other custom thing on top of either of them.

bredren2• 5 years ago

The Django ecosystem still has a pretty strong tether to jquery. It’s a problem.

okhan• 5 years ago

I help teach an introductory programming class to high school students. We still use jQuery to teach basic programming concepts, because it helps students add basic interactivity to a web page without a) the overhead of learning a full framework like React, or b) exposing them to the insanity of web APIs. Check out the curriculum if you're interested: https://github.com/itscodenation/curriculum-20-21

If you just want to add simple interactivity to a web page, jQuery provides a really nice API to do just that. Sure it's not the ideal thing to build a whole SPA on, but it has its place.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

I've written a number of small apps for testing at my company with basically jquery+html+rust backend "web server" and it works quite well if you're not trying to get too fancy.

brundolf• 5 years ago

There were other things like the "Ajax" (remember that word?) API, but that one's also been matched by a native API (fetch())

keeping state within the DOM has fallen out of favor of more comprehensible state management inside of JS

Not everything needs a whole reactive templating library. There's absolutely still a usecase for mostly-static sites to do imperative DOM manipulation.

The usecase for jQuery itself these days is dodgier, since as you point out most of its big features are native now. It should still help with browser compatibility (not necessary for modern-ish browsers, but many sites don't want to limit themselves to modern-ish browsers), its APIs are arguably still a little nicer in some places, and it does have a significant ecosystem of plugins so there's probably some value in having that stuff integrate together. But personally I would have a hard time justifying a whole library just for slightly nicer APIs unless I was doing something significantly complicated, and at that point I would just use React.

TedShiller• 5 years ago

Do people still use jQuery?

Oh yes. Very much so.

handzhiev• 5 years ago

jQuery is bundled in WordPress and many of the plugins so I guess there are a few sites still using it :)

rzwitserloot• 5 years ago

Still use it. Still love it.

Just last month I decided to toss a quite arbitrary `=>` in my javascript (I still write `function (args) { code }`), and shipped it. Immediately got a _TON_ of user complaints.

Turns out, we sent a link in a newsletter, and most folks were reading those in Outlook, and that evidently just opens links internally, and that is still IE11. We don't ordinarily support IE11, but given that this is a specific info page shown there, for this we make an exception, and... => doesn't even work there.

Thus, another year goes by, and another year where I am 100% convinced it is totally not worth my time or effort to investigate newer options.

I'm honestly confused about why jQuery is considered 'bad'.

It's a dependency - yeah, 30k or so. This complaint (that it adds load time) boggles my mind; in this day and age of 10MB+ load pages, and the choice is to complain about a 30k library? Some javascript-library variant of the Total Perspective Vortex may be warranted to try to make sense of this.

A more interactive (as in, between server and browser), more stateful integrated model? Oh, yeah, totally, I can see that, but that 'formula' surely isn't the go-to strategy for every web page out there, right? Most of the pages I write work perfectly well via a 'server generates data, server throws it through a template and sends it to browser, client downloads jquery and some javascript for that page which adds interactive elements', and wouldn't be any 'nicer' if it was a much more javascript-native fully state-shared amalgamation. When I do need that live-updating stateful interaction model, sure, don't need jQuery. But that 30k is the least of my worries if that happens.

shaicoleman• 5 years ago

"Fun" fact: Outlook today still uses Word to render HTML, which is about as capable as IE3 released in 1996.

tored2• 5 years ago

jQuery is "bad" when complexity increases.

jQuery's strength is the CSS selector based approach, where CSS, HTML and JS all "speak the same language", but it also its greatest weakness, your JS code gets too tightly coupled with the structure of the HTML, which makes it harder to refactor.

Good code management can solve this, like using a class or class like construct (e.g. jQuery plugin) to create independent components. But jQuery misses a lot of features to be a truly component based solution. jQuery UI widget is somewhat closer but still missing features like other component based solution has, e.g. no built in template library.

One of the most common things in JS is to attach listeners to HTML elements, however the most common way when doing so in jQuery is that you have a bunch of selectors and then some listener code, but that type of statements is not self explanatory, you have no function name to describe what it is doing or any other context. You see all these registrations of event listeners scattered across the project. What do they do? Are they in use? Hard to tell because searching your source code for a CSS selector is very difficult. That is why jQuery based projects usually have tons of leftover code from the last refactor, no one dares to touch it.

Many component based libraries out there lets you register a method name on the HTML element directly. Much better. If you can't find the method/function name referenced in your code, you can delete it.

It is true that you can add event listeners inline on your HTML element, but that is not how jQeury is usually written, because it is selector based.

terracatta• 5 years ago

I write a lot of B2B apps that have tabular data views. For all of its quirks, DataTables (https://datatables.net) does a great job and with the right plugins offers all the features my customers expect (re-ordering/resizing columns, column based search, fixed headers, fixed columns, item selection, etc.) DataTables requires jQuery.

Lots of other vanilla JS table plugins out there but I can't find one with all of those features that work when they are all on.

Turing_Machine2• 5 years ago

Do people still use jQuery?

All the time.

This has been rolled into the Javascript document api via document.querySelector, and document.querySelectorAll.

The official replacements for the stuff jQuery does tend to be verbose and non-orthogonal, as compared to the much more unified and consistent API of jQuery.

andrei_says_2• 5 years ago

Yes, absolutely.

The use case: a small CraftCMS-driven site using a bunch of long-lived jquery plugins and almost no custom JS.

Also, no need for transpiring or bundling.

It is wonderful.

FpUser• 5 years ago

"Also for me, along with I'm sure many others, keeping state within the DOM has fallen out of favor of more comprehensible state management inside of JS (like React Hooks, Redux"

In my opinion using React / Redux combo for state management is a poor choice. So to each their own. The arguments like: everyone else including my cat does that do not make really it any better in my eyes.

rburhum• 5 years ago

Yes. For quick small things.

When I need a to write a small web service, I usually just grab a python micro-framework and do the work. Not much complexity and not a lot of setup required. When I need to do something more elaborate that needs structure because it will get extended over time, I will take my time to setup something like Django... but it would be too much unnecessary work do to that for small web services.

The same applies to front-end.

When I need a few quick HTML pages that need some quick DOM manipulation, I usually just grab jQuery and do what we have been doing for years. Whenever I know that something will get extended over time and needs structure, that is when I take the time to setup React/Redux and all the build scripts necessary to make it work.

Just personal preference, but I am sure I am not alone...

Havelock• 5 years ago

Browser compatibility issues can be resolved with Babel and as such fulfills the need of jQuery and allows me to just write javascript.

AdrianB1• 5 years ago

Ajax, foreach, Datatables, small but perfect reasons to use it.

john-shaffer• 5 years ago

What is the current use-case for jQuery?

WordPress ships with it, so using jQuery often doesn't require any extra footprint. I still prefer vanilla calls for admin-only code, but jQuery has better compatibility for user-facing pages.

pull_my_finger• 5 years ago

there are rowser compatibility issues that jQuery solved

Current browser support[1] isn't really _that_ great. I know it used to be, but I'm not sure that's a legit selling point these days. Not that it's bad, but I hear that argument come up a lot.

[1] https://jquery.com/browser-support/

racl101• 5 years ago

Do people still use jQuery?

A ton.

jQuery is still holding up the client side code of a lot of projects I've worked on and doing a pretty decent job at it.

Sure they could be rewritten to not use it but there really hasn't been a business reason to do it.

Though I personally wouldn't use it on a new project moving forward that's for sure.

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Still use it because the code base is still full of it and don’t want to have multiple patterns. Plus the plugins are really useful and the syntax is nice.

jacobsenscott• 5 years ago

Still use jquery. Just look at any of the "you don't need jquery" sites to see how verbose even modern JS is for many simple dom manipulation tasks.

dheera• 5 years ago

I still use it all the time because document.querySelector is nowhere nearly as good as $, and it's extremely verbose to create a nested tree of nodes in vanilla JS.

I've really forgetten how to do things without jQuery. If anyone knows a framework that is less verbose than jQuery please tell me!

jedisct1• 5 years ago

Wordpress.

johnx123-up• 5 years ago

IMHO, if jQuery adds support for the virtual DOM, it will be more attractive

bobbydreamer• 5 years ago

Makes life lot easy....

yawaworht19782• 5 years ago

JQuery and reading Resig's book and viewing the source code are responsible for lifting me from horrible dev to below average dev:-)

I learned to extend the library and understood to create some minimal libraries for myself.

It can be very useful to this day and is almost a ballerina when comparing the bloat of other frameworks or library stacks.

You never know maybe the come up with something better than react.

shortlived2• 5 years ago

reading Resig's book

I hope you mean the JS ninja one because I just bought it week. Do you remember a particularly impactful section?

regus• 5 years ago

I consider secrets of the javascript ninja to be one of if not the best books on javascript. The section on functions and closures are a must read.

yawaworht19782• 5 years ago

The one I have meant was "jQuery in action", at the time that left a bigger impact as far learning is concerned. The jQuery team had promises and other things long before they became part of the standard API, he explains how they made it work.

However, secrets of a js ninja is very good as well, touches newer things like generators and es6, es7 features.

_the_inflator• 5 years ago

jQuery taught me how to write JavaScript frameworks. John Resig, the founder of jQuery, wrote a book called "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" was back then really a mindbender.

Function.prototype.toString() is really the craziest thing I know to date regarding JS. Heavily used in earlier versions of jQuery according to the book.

sethx2• 5 years ago

Please elaborate about toString() ?

byroot• 5 years ago

If called on a Function it returns the source of the function, which allows for all sorts of meta programming.

jffry• 5 years ago

The toString() method returns a string representing the source code of the function.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

unbendable• 5 years ago

Crazy to think what legacy jQuery and others left. Now I am using React and the usual lib stack.

But I remember using jQuery, pug (or jade), browserify, bower... that was what 5 to 6 years ago?

sethx2• 5 years ago

It’s still not dead??

drummer• 5 years ago

Jquery is awesome. I still use it in all my web projects.

niftylettuce5• 5 years ago

I'm a happy jQuery/Bootstrap user @ https://forwardemail.net.

The site scores ~100% on Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights and is ranked #1.

Open-startup @ https://forwardemail.net/open-startup!

Completely open-source too @ https://github.com/forwardemail

spiderfarmer2• 5 years ago

Yes but if you’re not using the latest JS framework how do you get girls.

pqdbr• 5 years ago

This. I was a happy Rails dev but html over the wire wasn’t cutting it at the club anymore. So I had to switch to React and now I’m married.

Just kidding. My wife loves Rails.

megous10• 5 years ago

You get a girl by going places where girls congregate at a similar or higher percentage to guys. Took me a while to figure that out... Anyway, I understand sarcasm, too.

hnrodey• 5 years ago

Upvote. Made me literal lol.

Sulamitachica• 5 years ago

Nice open start up page! Congrats on success, will be signing up for the free plan with my domain!

Johnny87• 5 years ago

Wow 15k??? That's impressive. I use another email forwarder but haven't been happy with it, maybe I'll switch.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS• 5 years ago

Super cool. I really like that you can also reply using this service to each individual inbox. Like a universal inbox but not married to any specific client/app. Maybe suggest making that a little more easier to learn on your marketing homepage.

For your current users, are you seeing them use this more like the demo gym owner video or for other use cases? Thanks

niftylettuce5• 5 years ago

So many cases. Some are using this on hundreds of sub-domains. I hope to launch SMTP and regex support soon. Then... it has final form, power level over 9000.

thesimon• 5 years ago

Do you use automatic translation? At least the German version feels a bit odd.

niftylettuce5• 5 years ago

Yeah, Google Translate via the npm package "mandarin" I made @ https://www.npmjs.com/package/mandarin. I planned to hire curators to go through the JSON files and clean it up - though I'm incredibly surprised that open source contributors have come forward (sometimes for their first time doing a PR) to submit fixes to locales. I give them free service for several years for their help.

tluyben2• 5 years ago

Offtopic but thanks for launching this.

A happy customer.

niftylettuce5• 5 years ago

Very glad to have you Tycho.

mehphp• 5 years ago

From your FAQ

No. Prices will never increase. Unlike other companies, we will never shutdown our service either.

How can you guarantee this?

xeromal2• 5 years ago

There are only two ways I think this can work.

Their price completely covers every user signed up at any scale. If they lose all but 1 customer, that customer can keep the lights with just their subscription.

The other is that company has such a large warchest it'd be impossible to run out of money.

jariel• 5 years ago

For those wondering, JQuery is still used on the majority of web sites in the world apparently [1]

I'm not sure how the data is run, but it's quite massive share however you cut it.

JQuery is still in it's foundational phase, it's still a 'core' thing, it's not remotely legacy yet.

[1] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/javascript

llimos• 5 years ago

A lot of them are probably due to Bootstrap (<5.0) bundling it.

cronix• 5 years ago

And WordPress, even current versions.

alexk307• 5 years ago

I still believe that jQuery is the best tool for the job if you're creating a small web application and don't want to learn an entire new framework.

padseeker• 5 years ago

YES this 1000X - I love React and choose to use it regularly and willingly. I am forced to use Angular quite a bit for my day job. While both of these libraries have their place not everything needs to be a single page app. Using server side rendered pages and sprinkling a little JS to add some DOM scripting and dynamic UX should not require adding React or Angular. It many cases using jQuery is good enough.

kureikain• 5 years ago

I no longer use jQuery nowadays due to React/Stimulus but one nice thing about jQuery is ability search for an element in a DOM note and append html. You can do it with raw JavaScript but jQuery API is light years ahead.

megous10• 5 years ago

For a good reason. XSS is no joke. I even block innerHTML and friends in my apps via empty trusted-types and require-trusted-types-for 'script' CSP.

superfamicom• 5 years ago

jQuery is also an amazing educational tool for teaching people to program in steps, learning the native DOM methods and then being introduced to jQuery has been really fun to see light bulbs going off for new students.

neilpanchal• 5 years ago

jQuery has the kindest, most warm hearted, whimsical release notes.

During the pandemic last year:

We hope you’re staying healthy and safe while so many of us are stuck at home. With a virus ravaging the planet, we realize that jQuery may not be a high priority for you or the sites you manage. When you do have a moment, we recommend that you review this new version and upgrade.

Some fun:

I’ve never gotten to say this on a jQuery release, but May the 4th be with you! A short time ago in a galaxy exactly like this one, we released jQuery 3.5.0.

Release notes are also very well thought out and their philosophy is to "move slowly and not break things". I admire that. They go to great extent to provide help about how to deal with breaking changes. Ends with a section thanking the contributors.

Super nice people.

Tade02• 5 years ago

their philosophy is to "move slowly and not break things"

The world needs more of this. I'm tired of seeing tooltips that don't disappear and thus get in the way and long GC pauses on Firefox, because nobody bothered to test their bloated React app in Firefox.

iamcreasy• 5 years ago

Speaking of nice developers, Reaper DAW developers are giving away temp license and in return only asks the user to wear mask. Warmed my heart to see it.

Klonoar• 5 years ago

I think jQuery is amazing, but one thing that I've found over the years is that the real killer for it was CSS animations becoming simpler to use and more widespread in terms of support.

The final thing I used to reach for jQuery for was animation support, but that need is by and large gone now. AJAX/JSONP is good there, but to be honest it's not something that needs a wrapper these days.

Glad to see the library is still updated, though - for sites that might not have a budget to upgrade, knowing it's still got support must be nice.

Tenal• 5 years ago

CSS animations are a pain-inducing non-starter for thousands of recurring use cases.

Example: Using Javascript to SHOW a modal, but then relying applying addClass('animate') using CSS animations to transition that modal (eg: bottom of screen to center, while fading in) are nearly impossible without tons of hackery. The animations do not render.

Hence jQuery animation calls.

megous10• 5 years ago

CSS animations are a necessity if you want any kind of performance on mobile browsers and older phones.

bredren2• 5 years ago

They are. But I still wouldn’t turn to jquery to solve this particular problem.

afavour• 5 years ago

What you’ve described is actually pretty simple to do with CSS Animations. Just not with CSS Transitions, which is what people usually use.

hising• 5 years ago

jQuery solved (and solves) a lot of browser inconsistencies (fewer now than before) and I guess a lot of older codebases still rely on it, so I am glad to see it is still moving forward. However, jQuery has a built in problem in modern web development, as the DOM-functions that now makes it obsolete, as in it does not solve the more complex problem of state management and scoping of components. For some sprinkling on top of server side rendered web pages I guess it still has some value if you need to cater for older web browsers, but for those who build applications that handles state and components for the current setup of browsers it is not needed in your toolbox any more when bootstrapping new projects. However, it helped us getting to a point where we could rely on solid libraries and focus on building better user experiences. I am glad it still gets updated but will probably not write "jQuery-code" anymore in my professional life.

synergy204• 5 years ago

Frontend has been a pain in the ass for me for quite a while as someone trying to learn frontend development.

jQuery's concise syntax beats everyone, I hope Javascript can adapt it someday, truly a KISS design gem. However I do need write code to do data-binding myself, which is important for interactivity.

Vuejs can be used to replace jQuery however it does not have the simple syntax, you do get data-binding for free without using its full-blown SPA framework. However you do need master a lot more concepts comparing to jQuery.

React/Angular are both overkill for 90% use cases, unless you're doing a serious SPA that is.

For me it's between jQuery and Vuejs these days, I learn both, one reason I worry about jQuery is that it's losing some steam and the development is not very active. Still I'm excited about this new release.

shortlived2• 5 years ago

one reason I worry about jQuery is that it's losing some steam and the development is not very active

It’s super mature which I like. Compare to Vue 3 which is now GA yet lots of related components like Vuetify are quarters behind in supporting v3. Lots of exciting features for sure but also lots of churn.

synergy204• 5 years ago

on jQuery 4.0 roadmap page: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/milestone/7 , it seems having no progress in two full years.

SilverRed5• 5 years ago

I remember the first time I used VueJS after being a long time JQuery developer. It was incredible how much power VueJS and similar frameworks put in your hand using such simple concepts. Not having to add event listeners to everything and manually re triggering things is revolutionary.

I was building dynamic UIs with ease that would have been massive and bug prone jobs in jquery.

synergy204• 5 years ago

do you use the full spa framework, or just use vuejs like jquery(use script to include it in each page)? whenever you have to do vuejs full SPA framework it comes with quite some concepts which takes (a lot) time to digest and stay up to date.

didip• 5 years ago

I super love jQuery. The proliferation of SPA is super unfortunate, maybe one day the pendulum will swing back to server side HTML with lighter JS for progressive enhancements.

selfmodruntime4• 5 years ago

React is trying that with server rendered components

maxpert• 5 years ago

I sometimes look at react, and these modern frameworks and wish they had a same nice API as jQuery. I still profoundly remember how much simple it was compared to Prototype.js, and how simple it was to do a zebra stripes on table. I am still looking for that next piece of revolutionary simple library that will bring the joy of jQuery with modern concepts and simplicity.

claytongulick• 5 years ago

I think a lot of the comments in this thread that are critical of SPAs are thinking about them wrong.

SPAs aren't (shouldn't be) a replacement for websites.

They are a fantastic option for replacing native apps (PWAs).

Moving from walled garden native apps to the open web is good for everyone except the app stores.

tored2• 5 years ago

Probably because many websites today are written as SPAs. Many of these modern frameworks are also pushed as to be used for websites.

pratzc07• 5 years ago

Are CSS Frameworks like Bootstrap still using jquery? Otherwise I don't see the use case of it now that we have so many JS frameworks plus Javascript as a language has changed so much.

mgerullis• 5 years ago

Bootstrap 5 dropped jquery but apparently it’s still possible to include it for tooltips and modals.

ulisesrmzroche• 5 years ago

It’s definitely on the way to becoming legacy tech, but jQuery was a great library back in the day, like, history book great.

It played a big part in the Web 2.0 days, could be argued that if it wasn’t for jQuery we wouldn’t have the modern web at all, or if so, it would be a lot worse.

temporallobe• 5 years ago

A lot of people throw shade on jQuery, but it’s extremely powerful and versatile. I’ve built entire apps with just jQuery, Foundation, and POJO classes (and other smaller libraries as needed sprinkled in). This stack is certainly not appropriate for all apps, but for small projects it’s far easier to manage than the overkill that is React or Angular. Sure, you don’t get generators and built-in spec testing or other Enterprise-friendly goodies, but for simple apps that use a REST API, jQuery sure as hell provides a nice set of tools. And while modern browsers support the query selector methods that sort mimic jQuery, this starts to get awfully tedious if you want to do complex DOM manipulation and you’ll find yourself writing functions that start to look a lot like jQuery. Why reinvent the wheel in order to save a few kb of space and pride yourself on having a “100% jQuery-free app!” when modern apps already load much larger libraries or minify and package the entire app’s code?

finnegan_third• 5 years ago

Is jQuery worth learning in 2021?

I started studying web development 2 years ago and I never feel the need to reach for jQuery. From the very beginning I wanted to get a solid knowledge of front end technologies without libraries or frameworks. After working for some time in this field I do feel the need for stuff like Bootstrap, Tailwind, Vue/React, but not jQuery. What's is selling point considering that DOM manipulation and HTTP requests has improved over the years in vanilla JS?

I've read through most of the comments and I see a lot of:

I'm used to jQuery syntax

$ is shorter than document.querySelector

jQuery provides better support for older browsers

First two aren't really meaningful to me, and for the last one, I'd say if you care about browser support you are probably compiling your code anyway.

I'm not familiar with using jQuery but I work with people that use it and I've realized it promotes some bad practices like:

Repeated DOM node selection due to the ease of use of $(selector)

Manipulation of CSS that should be done in CSS

jQuery is not JavaScript. Some people use it as a crutch and it shows

So my main question, if someone is comfortable with vanilla JS, does it make any sense learning jQuery?

AckmanDESU• 5 years ago

If you’ve been doing web dev for 2 years you can pick up jQuery in an evening. Go do it. You might never need it but learning is fun and understanding what jQuery is instead of hearing about it’s flaws on HN is a good idea.

jQuery 3.6.0

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